Share on bsky
View this post on Instagram
*Warning: adult language ahead!
~
Last year, I wrote something called Menopause: One Man’s Guide to Not Being a Complete C*** when your Partner is Struggling.
It was quite the interweb sensation, with thousands reading it.
Which is quite an achievement considering my principal qualification in menopause was having slept next to women going through it.
I was basically a war correspondent who’d never left the fucking hotel.
I’d witnessed the sweating, the insomnia, the rage, the disappearing libido, and the occasional desire to kill a man for slurping his noodles too loudly.
And somehow, because I had a penis and an opinion, I thought this made me qualified to explain it.
I thought I understood.
Sure, I knew about hot flushes. I knew the thermostat was no longer mine to control. I understood that if she’s standing in front of an open fridge at three in the morning, sweating her tits off and muttering, “I swear to fucking God…”, this is not the moment to ask what’s for breakfast.
This is the moment to put the kettle on, empty the dishwasher, and shut the fuck up.
It’s not because she’s irrational. But rather at three in the morning, half-naked and boiling alive in front of a fridge, she already has enough problems without one of them developing an opinion.
I knew sex could change. I knew moods could change. I knew telling a menopausal woman to “calm down” was less relationship advice and more assisted suicide with paperwork.
What I didn’t understand was what happens underneath all that.
Because menopause doesn’t arrive in some pristine little relationship laboratory. It arrives 50 years into a fucking life.
The kids. The mortgage. The ageing parents. The resentment. The dishes. The affair you supposedly forgave. The sex you stopped talking about. The apologies nobody really believed. The argument from 2009 that apparently isn’t over and, judging by recent evidence, never fucking will be.
The ten thousand tiny disappointments you swept under the relatingshit carpet until there’s a visible fucking hill in the lounge.
And then her hormones change.
Sleep goes to shit. Her body changes. Her brain occasionally walks into a room without telling her why, which, in fairness, is how I’ve operated since about 1987.
Her internal thermostat is apparently being controlled remotely by Satan.
Sex may hurt. Desire may disappear, return, disappear again, or turn up unexpectedly on a Wednesday afternoon like a tradesman who refuses to give you a fucking time window and then acts personally offended you aren’t in.
And somewhere in the middle of this biological coup, her partner looks at her and says: “You’ve been really fucking moody lately.”
Maaate. There are easier ways to die.
The turning point came for me when I finally understood this: not everything she’s angry about is a result of menopause.
One of the cruellest things we do to women at this stage of life is take every inconvenient truth they tell us and file it under “hormonal.”
Maybe she is hormonal.
Maybe you’re also being a cunt.
Medicine has yet to discover any reason these conditions cannot occur simultaneously.
Maybe she’s angry because she hasn’t slept properly since Easter.
Or maybe it’s because she’s spent 30 years remembering birthdays, finding passports, organising Christmas, knowing where the fucking scissors are, and listening to you announce you’ve “helped with dinner” because you carried two fucking plates to the sink, waiting for her to load them into the dishwasher.
Maybe menopause hasn’t suddenly made her angry. Maybe it’s simply removed the diplomatic service that previously handled her complaints.
That’s what I missed the first time.
Sometimes menopause doesn’t create the problem. It removes her remaining tolerance for the one that’s been sitting opposite her for 20 years.
Unfortunately, he’s confused too.
The woman who once reached for him doesn’t.
Sex changes. Touch changes. Maybe penetration hurts. Maybe she starts avoiding cuddling because she’s learned that a cuddle at 9:30 has somehow become a legally binding agreement to consider a blowjob by 9:47.
So he feels rejected. She feels hunted.
He reaches for sex because he wants proof you’re okay. She pulls away because she doesn’t want another fucking negotiation.
He withdraws emotionally because he’s hurt. She experiences his withdrawal as confirmation that tenderness apparently came with terms and conditions.
Nothing gets a woman wetter than discovering affection has a fucking invoice attached.
And round they go.
Two frightened people sleeping 12 inches apart, each privately convinced the other one stopped loving them first.
He asks: “Are you still attracted to me?” What he actually means is: “I’m fucking terrified I’m losing you.”
She says: “Don’t touch me.” What she may means is: “I’m fucking terrified I’m losing myself.”
But nobody says that. Because vulnerability is difficult and the thermostat is right fucking there. So they argue about 18 degrees instead.
Then there’s her body.
Do not provide a running commentary. You are not David-fucking-Attenborough. She owns a mirror. She knows. Weight moves. Skin changes. Hair changes. Breasts change. Vaginal tissue changes.
Imagine inhabiting a body for 50 years and suddenly having to negotiate with it like a difficult tenant who’s changed the locks and stopped answering emails.
Then imagine the person who’s supposed to love you looking you up and down and saying: “You’ve put on a little weight.”
Congratulations. You’ve selected cremation.
But underneath the joke is something considerably darker.
Grief.
She may be grieving a body she thought she’d have longer, a sexuality she understood, a face she recognised.
Children who don’t need her the same way. Parents disappearing. A career winding down. And a culture that decided a woman becomes invisible at roughly the age a man starts being called “distinguished.”
He’s George-fucking-Clooney. She’s apparently supposed to disappear into linen under the fragrance of Tom Ford’s Fucking Fabulous.
And perhaps the strangest grief of all…
The woman she used to be.
Meanwhile her husband is standing in front of another mirror wondering where his hair went, why his knees sound like someone opening a packet of crisps, whether his dentures are sufficiently attached to survive a vigorous sandwich, and why his cock , once a largely self-governing institution , now requires 48 hours’ notice, favourable weather conditions, and approval from middle management.
Nobody tells you that two people can start grieving themselves at roughly the same time. And if they’re not careful, they’ll mistake that grief for falling out of love.
That’s the real fucker.
Sometimes nobody stopped loving anybody. They just stopped recognising themselves. And then blamed the nearest person.
I understand a little more about that now.
Cancer treatment has put me on hormone therapy.
To be clear: I am not claiming I’ve experienced menopause. I haven’t.
I’ve been given the visitor’s pass, not fucking citizenship. But fuck me, the gift shop is enlightening.
Hot flushes. Night sweats. Brain fog. Fatigue that doesn’t give a shit how long I’ve slept. Mood changes that see me arguing with a pillow.
And a libido that once kicked the front door in without knocking and now sends its apologies by email citing unforeseen circumstances.
The other day, Sam and I were walking when a flush hit me. “Jeezus,” I said. “They really do just come out of nowhere, don’t they?” I said this with the astonishment of a man announcing he’d personally discovered electricity.
Sam looked at me. There was no sympathy. Just the quiet satisfaction of a woman watching karma take off its coat and make itself comfortable.
Fair enough.
Because when your own body starts changing the rules without consulting you, something shifts.
There’s a peculiar fucking terror in becoming unfamiliar to yourself. And I realised I’d spent years hearing women describe this and filing it under hormonal, as though hormonal meant slightly less real.
Now my hormones are changing.
Turns out hormonal is remarkably fucking real when they’re your hormones.
That’s what I didn’t fully understand when I wrote Menopause: One Man’s Guide to Not Being a Complete C*** when your Partner is Struggling.
I thought the man’s job was to survive menopause.
It isn’t.
It’s to make sure she doesn’t have to survive him as well.
Don’t diagnose every emotion.
Don’t make every sexual change about you.
If sex hurts, believe her. Learn that intimacy doesn’t always have to end with your cock receiving a participation trophy.
Touch her without it being a down payment.
Hold her without immediately trying to turn the cuddle into a hostage negotiation involving your penis.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t stand there waiting for your “old wife” to come back.
She probably isn’t. Perhaps neither of you are.
That’s ageing. That’s partnership. That’s the deeply inconvenient arrangement known as being alive.
Bodies change. Desire changes. People change.
The woman you married disappears in tiny increments.
So does the man she married.
And maybe that’s not the tragedy.
Maybe the tragedy is spending so much time demanding the old versions back that you never bother meeting the people standing in front of you now.
The question isn’t whether she can remain the woman you originally fell in love with. It’s whether you can stay curious enough to fall in love with the woman she’s becoming.
And whether she’ll do the same for the ageing, frightened, occasionally useless fuckwit you’re becoming too.
Nobody gets to remain 35.
Love isn’t preserving each other in fucking formaldehyde. It’s recognising each other through the changes.
And here’s something else I missed the first time I wrote about menopause.
We talk endlessly about what women lose. Oestrogen. Sleep. Bone density. Libido. The ability to wear a fucking polo neck without spontaneously combusting.
We don’t talk nearly enough about what some women seem to find.
Themselves.
I call her Crone Yoda.
She’s seen some shit. Raised children. Lost people. Survived heartbreak. Changed bodies. Buried parents. Forgiven things she probably shouldn’t have and spent several decades knowing where everyone else’s fucking passport is.
Then something shifts.
She stops needing quite so much permission. She knows what she likes. She knows what she doesn’t.
And she finally discovers that no is a complete sentence requiring neither footnotes nor a fucking apology.
This can be alarming for the man beside her. Particularly if some of his comfort depended on her not discovering it.
He may look at her and think: “Menopause has changed her.”
Maybe.
Or maybe she’s simply run out of fucks, hormones, patience, and people she’s willing to abandon herself for.
That’s Crone Yoda.
She doesn’t have all the answers.
She just has considerably less interest in everybody else’s.
Wise she is.
And if you’re lucky enough to love a woman becoming more herself, don’t stand there demanding the old one back.
Meet this one.
She might be fucking magnificent. She may also occasionally be standing in front of the freezer with her tits out.
Both things can be true.
So put on a fucking jumper. Open the window. Make the tea.
Listen.
And shut the fuck up.
Because somewhere amongst all that disruption, something extraordinary can happen.
She stops disappearing from her own fucking life.
Don’t be the reason she has to start again.
So look at the woman standing in front of you.
She’s buried people. Raised people. Loved. Lost. Endured. Changed. Had her body rewrite the rules while she was still fucking living in it.
She’s not the woman she was.
Neither are you.
Thank fuck.
Now introduce yourselves.
~
Read 5 comments and reply